Saturday, 11 June 2016

The more I study the Remain campaign and its leading figures, the more it seems the entire leadership of it is centred in the Westminster-Whitehall-City triangle. Let me call it the London Bubble.They all know each other, these London-based mandarins. Politicos, bureaucrats, diplomats, quangocrats and lawyers; bankers, financiers, tycoons, profiteers and city slickers. Add the attendant journos and broadcasters who have abandoned their duty to hold establishment to account and found it more chummy to join it.You see their faces coming up on programme after programme, panel after panel, debate after debate. You see them mouthing the same rubbish about trade and prosperity and avoiding any mention of sovereignty or independence.

As David Cameron’s Cabinet colleagues fan out across the media to tell us how catastrophic it would be for Britain to leave the EU, one minister is in a class of her own. It may not be surprising that Amber Rudd, as the sister of Roland Rudd – one of the leading lobbyists for Britain to stay in the EU – is a keen Europhile. But when our Energy and Climate Change Secretary claims, in a Daily Telegraph interview, that it would be bad for Britain’s energy security and costs to be excluded from our leading role in the EU’s “energy market”, we have to ask what game she is playing.

She obviously hopes we will not notice that the only thing which gives Britain a “leading role” in this respect is that we already have an energy policy quite different from anyone else’s. We are the only country committed (by the Climate Change Act) to cutting our “CO2 emissions” by a staggering 80 per cent within 34 years.

It is all very well her calling on our energy suppliers to cut their bills at a time when oil prices are continuing to fall. But everything she is doing to meet that target is destined to push those bills ever higher.

Leaving the EU would detonate a bomb under the British economy, David Cameron has said as he joined with Labour, Lib Dem and Green politicians to argue that the leave campaign was being reckless with people’s futures. --“Don’t throw away your job, don’t throw away your children’s futures, don’t throw away the strength and future of our country on the basis of misleading statistics peddled by a campaign determined to say anything and indeed everything to get the outcome they want,” he said. “That is what is happening. Do not be misled. Do not let them persuade you of this reckless course for our country.”He said there would be a recession, years of uncertainty and weaker trade in the event of Brexit, and the leave campaign had failed to set out how it would deal with those consequences.“Add those things together – the shock impact, the uncertainty impact, the trade impact – and you put a bomb under our economy,” he said. “And the worst thing is we’d have lit the fuse ourselves.”

The campaign for Britain to leave the European Union has taken a 4-5 percentage point lead ahead of a June 23 referendum, according to online polls by ICM and YouGov, sending sterling towards three-week lows against the U.S. dollar.The swing towards "Out" with less than three weeks to go comes as both sides step up their campaigning to try to win over the large number of still undecided voters with warnings over the economy and immigration. The ICM poll of 1,741 people taken June 3-5 showed 48 percent would vote to leave, up from 47 percent a week earlier, while 43 percent would opt to stay, down 1 percentage point from a week earlier. The YouGov poll of 3,495 people on June 1-3 showed 45 percent would opt to leave the EU, up from 40 percent in a comparable poll a month earlier, while 41 percent would opt to stay, down from 42 percent.This could trigger a new beginning for Britain - and Europe!